Chancellor's Parashah Commentary

This comment is by Professor Judith Hauptman, the Rabbi Philip R. Alstat Associate Professor of Talmud at JTS.

This Shabbat we will read two Torah portions, Aharei Mot and K'doshim .
The topics covered in these parashiyot range from the ritual requirement
of sending a scapegoat out to the desert on Yom Kippur, to a list of
forbidden sexual relationships, to fundamental social legislation,
reminiscent somewhat of the Ten Commandments.

Included in K'doshim is perhaps the most famous line in the entire Torah,
"You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Lev. 19:18). This verse
achieved its fame not just because of its simple, powerful message but
also because of the well–known anecdote in which Hillel, a Talmudic sage,
tells a potential convert that this rule is the essence of the Torah,
something a person can absorb while standing on one foot, and that the
rest is merely commentary (Bavli, Shabbat 31a). This is an astounding
statement, especially if we understand Hillel to be saying that how a
person treats others outweighs in importance how a person deals with God.

Few people notice that several verses later in the same chapter another
statement of prescribed "love" appears, this time mandating that one love
the non–Israelite who lives among Israelites, a reference to someone who
does not worship the God of Israel or assimilate into the people of
Israel. The verse tells us, "When a stranger resides with you in your
land, you shall not wrong him.... You shall love him as yourself, for
you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I the Lord am your God" (vv.
33,34).

This rule is hard to understand in its biblical setting. The Torah is
already very demanding when it tells a Jew to love all other Jews, but it
verges on the absurd when it tells a Jew to actively love those
individuals who live among Jews but who share ties neither of religion
nor of kinship with them.

One way out of this quandary is to determine if "love" in these two
verses means active, emotional involvement, as it does elsewhere in the
Bible, in the Torah in particular. A person is obligated to love God
with heart, soul, and might (Deuteronomy 6:5). These words strongly
imply an emotional involvement, the same kind that we read about when the
text says that Abraham loved his son Isaac or Jacob loved his wife
Rachel.

However, if we return to K'doshim and read both of these "love" verses in
context, we see an altogether different meaning emerge. The few verses
preceding "love your neighbor as yourself" tell us: do not render unfair
decisions by favoring either the poor or the rich but judge fairly (v.
15); do not deal basely with your countryman and do not profit from his
blood (v. 16); do not hate him but rather reprove him (v. 17); do not
take vengeance or bear a grudge against him (v. 18). These verses, which
lead up to the concluding statement of this unit––"Love him"––define for
the reader what "love" means when it is mandated for one's fellow–man: in
negative terms it means to refrain from treating him unfairly or abusing
or exploiting him, and in positive terms it means to seek his welfare
actively, to make sure that no one mistreats him. If this is how one Jew
loves another Jew, then "love" makes even more sense when directed
towards a stranger living among Jews. The Torah says, do not wrong or
oppress him; instead, we should "love" him, meaning, to seek his
welfare, to protect an outsider from abuse by insiders (v. 34). The
telltale phrase "because you were strangers in the Land of Egypt" means
we Jews should refrain from oppressing others because we remember what it
is like to be taken advantage of. This clinches the argument. We were
not seeking to have the ancient Egyptians love us, just not to treat us
any differently from the way they treated each other.

It therefore seems that when Hillel interpreted "love your neighbor as
yourself" to mean "what is hateful to you, do not do unto others," he was
providing us with the simple meaning of the verse. Not that Hillel, as
some say, was compromising on the requirement of actively loving other
Jews. Rather, he was explaining to us that in this context of loving Jew
and non–Jew, the Bible seeks to eliminate the exploitation and abuse of
others, the kind we read about in Genesis 19 when the men of Sodom sought
to molest the two out–of–town messengers. That is, the two verses about
love, when not shorn of their context, are making the extraordinary
statement that caring for self and family is not enough, and neither is
avoiding abusing others. Jews must actively seek to eliminate injustice
against Jew and non–Jew, wherever they see it. This is as powerful a
social message as we find in the Bible.

If we now catapult ourselves forward about 1,200 years to the period of
the Rabbis of the Talmud, we find that they interpreted the verses about
loving non–Jews in an altogether different way. The Hebrew word "ger,"
meaning stranger, was co–opted by the rabbis to mean proselyte, someone
who abandons his or her religion and adopts Judaism freely. This meaning
of "ger" is standard to this very day. But, even after reinterpreting
the word "ger" to mean "convert", the rabbis went on to apply the verse
about loving the stranger to converts! That is, even though "ger" now
meant something entirely different from what it used to, the rabbis
maintained the biblical teachings on the subject of "ger." A convert may
not be oppressed; his welfare must be sought. The rabbis further say
that the Torah warns against oppressing the convert in 36(!) different
places, thus suggesting that this was an area in which people were
deficient.

In fact, the concept of choosing Judaism freely is so appealing to the
Rabbis of the Talmud that they describe the revelation at Sinai as a mass
conversion ceremony for all those who had left Egypt. Upon conducting a
close reading of the biblical text, the rabbis determine that immediately
prior to hearing the mitzvot recited at Sinai and accepting them as
standards of Jewish behavior, the men circumcised themselves and the men
and women alike immersed themselves in a mikveh (Bavli, Yevamot 46b).
This rather striking instance of rabbis reading their own later ideas
into an earlier text makes a wonderful point: By regarding even those who
were born as Israelites as converts to Judaism, the rabbis not only find
biblical affirmation of the validity of conversion to Judaism, but also
state their view of ideal Jewish attitudes to religious practice. It is
important to note that the Bible itself never speaks of formal conversion
to Judaism. It assumes that when a foreign woman marries a Jewish man
she is subsumed into his religion. Conversion independent of marriage
first appears in the post–biblical period.

We now return to the verses in K'doshim . Reading them through a rabbinic
lens, we find that they preach an even broader message than when read on
their own: the most basic principle of Judaism is that, on a human level,
we do not distinguish between those who are Jewish and those who live
among Jews but are not Jewish. Furthermore, on a religious level, we do
not distinguish between those who were born as Jews and those who chose
to become Jews out of conviction. Every person who is born a Jew, every
convert to Judaism, and every non–Jew who lives among us merits our
active monitoring of his or her welfare and protection from
discrimination and exploitation. This is the grand message of these two
"love" verses of K'doshim .